Hello, we had a small Factorio 0.17 LAN party this weekend. The purpose was to try and test some of the new features and play the game properly as I haven't had time for that for quite a while. I used this opportunity to think about all the smaller or bigger decisions, features or change of plans in the context of playing the game for many hours.
Nightvision nightmare As Twinsen continues tweaking the combat, he started to complain about the “green fog” effect that is applied during night when the player’s character has nightvision goggles equipped. Nightvison in 0.14 works in a way that it reduces the darkness of night, and then draws a transparent green overlay. This washes out the colors, reduces contrast, and makes the picture pretty unpleasant to look at. The first idea was to just make the green overlay be rendered around light sources, to reward players who put lights into their bases, by not making the base look worse with nightvision on. This didn’t look too good, and as we were trying to figure out how to improve it, other developers, especially artists, caught on to what we were doing, and started to provide their own ideas. Next we tried to darken only the red and blue channels when nightvision is on. This will make the picture green without losing contrast and we can drop the green overlay. We kept “not applying effect onto lighted area” logic and it started to look interesting. Albert wasn’t happy with the result though, so we continued experimenting. We added a soft green tint to lighted areas, and a bright green glow onto the transition between light and darkness. Then we added white highlights to light sources and it finally started to pleasant to look at. We will stick with this version for time being, but plan to work on it more. We can’t agree if this change is for better or worse even inside the team. It seems everybody has their own idea about how nightvision effect should look like and what benefits it should provide to players. For example it would be nice to have goggles with greyscale effect that would highlight biters. So maybe heat vision?
Hello, We are still diligently working away at the Space Age bug reports.
Hello, It's Earendel back for another electric adventure. You got your first look at Fulgora in FFF-398. (If you haven't read that already please read that first.) Now let's take a look at the new planet's mechanics.
0.15 status Work has been going swiftly on 0.15, but there are still many major topics we have left to close. We mentioned previously that our estimate for release would be near the end of February, and while this has been our internal goal, we won't quite be able to make it. One of the main reasons for this delay is us underestimating how long it would take to stabilize 0.14 and the new multiplayer code. We thought that because it was a relatively small 'major' release, that it would not take much time to make it stable. However the great community members playing the experimental version kept finding bugs for us to fix, and even now there are still several 0.14 bugs being identified and fixed in 0.15. The extending bug fixing of 0.14 was no doubt necessary, but it has led us to be somewhat behind schedule on several features of 0.15. Our current optimistic estimate is that we will be able to release an experimental version of 0.15 at the end of March, and we will keep you all up to date on its progress.
Hello, not much at all has happened this week. It has been rather quiet with the Art department out of office the last few days. However there has been some additional success on our recruitment drive, so there will be an additional 3-4 bodies (live) in the office within the next month.
Hello, it is me, posila, with another technical article. Sorry.
Hello, welcome to the weekly dose of information that proves that we are not slacking :)
